The quick hit

This absorbing chronicle of a hijacking in the Indian Ocean has the strengths of the best procedural dramas – it assumes a distanced and objective tone and packs an emotional wallop.

Grade: A-

In "A Hijacking," writer-director Tobias Lindholm, best known as a writer for the international TV sensation "Borgen," coolly tips you into a vortex. Then, with wily cinematic instincts, he just barely tugs you out of it.

The plot couldn't be starker. A small troop of armed Somalis board a Danish cargo ship in the Indian Ocean and demand a $15 million ransom. The movie cuts between a shipping-company conference room in Copenhagen and the cramped quarters where the Somalis isolate the most useful hostages – the ship's captain, engineer and cook.

What's initially off-putting – but cumulatively powerful – is Lindholm's refusal to exploit the story's built-in theatrics. For example, after several introductory scenes, the pirates' seizure of the ship occurs off-screen. The real drama, for Lindholm, begins after they take control.

His restraint pays off. He draws you deeper into the crises on board and in the boardroom precisely because he disdains cheap thrills or simplification. The way he tells the story, each dial tone or fax ring assumes the impact of a gunshot. With the sinewy texture of unadorned prose, his filmmaking sensitizes you to real-life details. Spilled or spoiled food or drink becomes as dire as a rifle to the head.

The Somalis are not ordinary criminals seeking a big score. They're pirates. They live up to that title with their unpredictability and unwillingness to honor anyone else's rules or timetables.

Peter (Søren Malling), the negotiator for the shipping company, is an honorable CEO, hoping to stabilize conditions for his men while he haggles over how much ransom his company is willing to pay. He insists on conducting the give-and-take himself, despite the misgivings of his board and the advice of a seasoned hostage negotiator (who is played, with brisk authority, by an actual hostage negotiator, Gary Skjoldmose Porter).

As the talks drag on for months, Malling, an intense, no-nonsense actor, subtly embodies how the crisis saps Peter's resiliency. (In a shocking interchange between Peter and his wife, Lindholm dramatizes how far he's stretched.) In a sense, Peter is a hostage, too. The self-consciously polite Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), on the opposite end of the telephone, insists he is not a pirate, merely their designated facilitator. In "A Hijacking," an irrepressible corporate operator, Peter, meets an immovable enigma, Omar.

The movie gives equal weight to the squeeze put on its white-collar and blue-collar characters. As Peter and Omar joust in a string of tense, terse phone calls, Peter's shipboard employees cling to their hopes that the company will pony up and that the pirates will not seriously injure them. The crew is, after all, the pirates' bargaining chip.

Lindholm creates a magnet for our sympathies with one of the stars of "Borgen," Pilou Asbæk. He plays the ship's cook, Mikkel, who starts out as an endomorphic Everyman but grows gaunter and more elusive. Mikkel begins the film promising his wife and young daughter, pre-hijack, that he'll be returning a mere two days late. He becomes a beacon of embattled decency. In the movie's emotional high point, Mikkel croons a traditional Danish song, mostly to himself, to mark his only child's birthday. The pirates can't comprehend what he's singing, and his best shipboard friend, Jan (Roland Moller), starts to worry about his sanity. Lindholm plays one murder of a shipmate completely off of Asbæk's anguished eyes. It's heartbreaking.

The director deploys handheld cameras – without making you seasick. He eschews flash as he cleaves to his mission – testing the group efforts of men who are joined solely by business agreements and workplace camaraderie. (The few times we see family members they are understandably, unrelievedly anguished.)

Lindholm isn't the most seductive or inspired filmmaker, but his grasp of bartering rhythms brings the negotiation vividly to life. This director pays attention to the evolving, intangible bonds of his wholehearted actors, who conjure unexpected catharses. When the pirates, running short of food, bring the cook and the engineer, Jan, on-deck to fish, Mikkel hooks a big one. It rouses more excitement than any of the splashy, CGI-enhanced antics in "Kon-Tiki." The Somalis root for Jan and Mikkel to reel the catch in. So does the audience.

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